The U.S. Chamber of Commerce this week had its 2014 Corporate Citizenship Conference, three days of panel discussions based on the premise that companies “invest time, resources, and capital to help make the world a better place.”

Not exactly what one thinks of when considering how powerful entities can make the world a better place.

An examination of the conference’s agenda also reveals some Orwellian head-scratchers.

A Dow Chemical Company executive participated in a panel called “Cultivating Local Impact,” which discussed how companies “create citywide sustainability, resilience, obesity prevention and economic empowerment programs.” Meanwhile, Dow is listed as third on the University of Massachusetts Amherst’s Toxic 100 Air Polluters list. Last year, Dow released more than 6 million pounds of toxic air into communities, according to the index, 19 percent of which were in poor communities and 38 percent of which were in communities of color. Toxic pollution damages the sustainability of the global community and of the local communities where polluting facilities operate. Are these the local impacts the Chamber wants to promote?
Another confusing component was a panel called “Building Local Community Disaster Resilience” being moderated by a Chamber director.” Climatologists overwhelmingly conclude that human-made climate emissions have a hugely destabilizing effect on climate systems, leading to impacts like a high frequency of severe weather events that were previously rare. These effects in turn lead to resource scarcity, displacement and destabilization of nations – as the Pentagon terms it, the “threat multipliers” caused by climate change. The Chamber, despite its hosting and participation in this panel, has a history of denying human contributions to climate change and is opposing efforts by the EPA to mitigate human impacts. The Chamber also does not support regulations to limit fracking, despite research showing local health harms associated with it and studies questioning natural gas’ proclaimed superiority to coal in terms of greenhouse gas emissions.

If the Chamber truly wants to help local communities, it should work with them, companies and the government to find ways in which the economy can succeed while lowering greenhouse gas emissions and other harmful pollution, and should support holding companies responsible for their negative impacts.

The need for the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act remains alive and well. Companies and executives are still getting caught red-handed. The U.S. Chamber still wants the highly effective law weakened.

Since the landmark guilty plea and settlement in the Alcoa Worldwide Alumina (Alcoa) case in January, companies have paid another $196 million in penalties for violations of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act (FCPA). In March, Marubeni Corporation pleaded guilty to bribing an Indonesian member of Parliament, among other foreign officials. In April, Hewlett-Packard subsidiaries in Russia, Poland and Mexico accepted responsibility for bribing former executives of state-owned companies and police department officials and for maintaining a multi-million dollar slush fund for various other corrupt payments in those countries. The Department of Justice (DOJ) has indicted several other individuals since the Alcoa case as well, including Wall Street broker-dealers and a former vice president of Bechtel Corporation.

Despite these recent successes in curbing egregiously corrupt behavior under the FCPA, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce wants to weaken the law. A few days before Halloween 2010, the Chamber released a report that dressed up the FCPA as a boogeyman that scared away business with its “increasingly aggressive” interpretation by enforcement agencies. The Chamber report demanded five amendments to the FCPA — nominally to provide guidance for businesses in complying with the law — that actually were designed to hamstring enforcement. Undeterred by the subsequent release of a 130-page guidance document by DOJ and the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) rejecting the Chamber’s demands, the Chamber still ranks FCPA “reform” among their lobbying priorities for 2014.

One of the Chamber’s proposed amendments calls for limited liability for corporations whose subsidiaries violate provisions of the FCPA — in other words, rewarding ignorance (or feigned ignorance) by parent companies. But loosening the rules for parent companies creates an incentive for more of the same corrupt acts described in the Hewlett-Packard subsidiaries’ admissions of misconduct just this April.

Public Citizen’s November 2013 report, “License to Bribe,” details all five amendments sought by the Chamber, and provides common-sense rebuttals to each proposal. The bottom line: corruption is demonstrably harmful to both business and democracy.

The FCPA is America’s most salient global anti-corruption tool. Since it was first enacted in 1977, countries and international organizations around the world have followed America’s lead and enacted similar global anti-corruption rules. Now that business is more global than ever before, it is no time to weaken the FCPA.

Jess Unger is a legal fellow with Public Citizen’s Congress Watch division

When the U.S. Chamber of Commerce hosts Securities and Exchange Commission Chair Mary Jo White and other Washington regulators at its Capital Markets Summit today, you’ll have to excuse our skepticism that it’s speaking to the concerns of any businesses other than those on Wall Street.

The Chamber’s claims to represent Main Street are misleading and inaccurate. At last year’s Capital Markets Summit, for example, the Chamber presented a survey called “How Main Street Businesses Use Financial Services” – but its polling of “Main Street businesses” explicitly excluded any businesses making less than $75 million per year in revenue. Meanwhile, the U.S. Small Business Administration defines a small business for many industries as making no more than $7 million to $35.5 million per year in revenue (sidebar—we feel even those numbers are too high, as no ”mom and pop” shop we know pulls in $7 million a year.)

In January 2013, the Chamber and two other business associations submitted a comment to the SEC opposing political spending disclosure. The new rule would make it impossible for public corporations that give money to the Chamber to remain hidden as they oppose policies widely supported by many of their shareholders and most Americans—on issues ranging from climate change to banking policy.

The Chamber vs. small banks on Dodd-Frank

At today’s event the Chamber will also likely oppose many of the still-uncompleted Dodd-Frank rules. Since the law’s passage, the Chamber has ranged from vehemently opposed to the bill to presenting “fixes” that would completely disable it. Meanwhile, many of the small businesses the Chamber purports to speak for have been more nuanced and supportive of the reforms. Groups like the Independent Community Bankers of America have said that Dodd-Frank, while complex and introducing new compliance costs, has done good things for them. If anything, they want further modifications in the law distinguishing them from big banks – not to be spoken for by those who are skewed toward Wall Street. The Main Street Alliance has testified in explicit support of Dodd-Frank, saying, “The efforts to repeal all or part of Dodd-Frank are doing more to create uncertain circumstances than any other factor related to the Act.”

And in what’s become a routine exercise in chutzpah, agents from the Chamber of Commerce show up at congressional hearings and in the media claiming the reform act stifles small business. Invariably, the Chamber’s agent claims to represent 3 million small businesses across the nation, even though more than half of its donations came from 64 donors. Invariably, they launch into examples only relevant to the mega-banks.

A case in point: On February 26, Chamber representative Tom Quaadman claimed that new Dodd-Frank restrictions on bank investments in collateralized loan obligations (CLOs) would harm small businesses.

CLOs are packages of loan, and each loan in the package is likely to be for more than $20 million. As one of the Chamber’s own fact sheets explains, they are “portfolios” of “large commercial loans.” They are not standard small business loans for the corner grocery, and they are generally purchased by large banks. Of the $300 billion CLO market, banks hold $70 billion. Of this, the largest three banks hold about 70 percent.

Protecting bloated CEO pay

More evidence that the Chamber represents big banks rather than small ones is its longstanding defense of outsized, taxpayer-subsidized CEO compensation. Chamber speakers may reference a simple rule to require disclosure of CEO pay today. The rule would require companies to publish the ratio of the CEO’s pay to that of the median paid employee. On May 23, 2013, Chamber envoy Quaadman criticized this reform in congressional testimony. The rule only applies to firms traded on the stock market—hardly small companies. Quaadman nevertheless dared to cite a company that claimed it would cost $7.6 million to figure the ratio. The company isn’t named, possibly because of the embarrassment that it doesn’t know what its employees are paid, or can’t figure a median. Or more likely, the number is fabricated hyperbole.

Again, is the Chamber truly focused on small business concerns or on the protection of the wealthy elite? In a mom-and-pop shop, presumably mom and pop know what each other makes.

Wall Street crashed the economy where Main Street lives. If the Chamber truly represented Main Street, it would champion stronger rules to make Wall Street small and stable enough to avoid crashing the economy again.

This post was written by Sam Jewler, communications officer for Public Citizen’s U.S. Chamber Watch program, and Bartlett Naylor, financial policy advocate for Public Citizen’s Congress Watch division.